The present invention relates to a vehicle control apparatus for controlling a running state of vehicle.
Previously, at a vehicle running in traffic jam, start, acceleration and stop of the vehicle have been conducted by accelerator and brake manipulations of a driver. Hence, there has been a problem that frequent changeovers between the both manipulations (changeover between brake-pedal depression and accelerator-pedal depression) are burdensome to the driver. Moreover, in a scene where a vehicle runs over a bump such as a step formed at an entrance of parking space when the vehicle is parked, the driver needs to switch between the accelerator manipulation and the brake manipulation more rapidly, resulting in a burden to the driver. Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 10-329684 discloses a previously-proposed technique. In this technique, a predetermined braking force based on a vehicle-body speed and a manipulated amount of accelerator pedal is outputted.